Why Qualifying Your Customers is the Most Under-rated Skill to Achieve Sales Success

Before Covid-19 hit, Cedric had a very hectic schedule as a salesperson.?He needed to make 20 customer appointments per week or an average of 4 customer meetings a day.?His daily routine was to report to the office before 09:00 hrs every day and had to leave the office by 10:00 hrs to meet customers.?He could not be back in the office before 16:00 hrs, where that’s when he would prepare quotations and proposals for the customers he had met during the day.

?Every month, Cedric would have to hit his monthly sales targets.?If he could not meet his targets 2 months in a row, he would be warned.?If he missed his targets for the third month, he would be fired.?Throughout his 2 years with the company, Cedric had missed his monthly targets several times and got warning letters on a couple of occasions because he missed his targets twice in a row.

Every time Cedric missed his targets, his manager Jessica would ask him to meet more customers to “meet the numbers”.?This is despite Cedric having already met 20 customers almost every week.?While he tried to meet more customers as demanded by his manager, Cedric met his monthly sales targets by asking some of his best customers to buy more or bring forward their purchases.

Then Came Covid....

When Covid-19 struck, Cedric could no longer have face-to-face meetings like many other salespeople.?His company’s overall sales turnover fell drastically, and Cedric was retrenched along with many of his sales colleagues.

Fortunately for Cedric, he quickly found another job requiring salespeople to sell to customers remotely.?Unlike his previous employer, Cedric’s new employer did not measure his efforts based on the gross number of online customer meetings.?Instead, Cedric was asked to qualify his customers based on 4 broad criteria:

1.?Needs:

• Can Cedric’s company solve the customer’s problem, achieve some goals or improve things?

?2.?Budget:

• Can the customer have the proper budget to afford the proposed solutions,
• Is the expected revenue and margins worth the effort to sell to the customer?
• Does the customer have a reasonable payment term and pay on time?

3.?Relationship:

• Does the customer trust Cedric and is willing to share information?
• Can Cedric and his colleagues communicate directly with key stakeholders?

4.?Potential:

• How likely will the customer increase purchases in the coming years?
• ?Will the customer be a good reference case for other potential customers?

Cedric used the same qualifying process for the sales opportunities he uncovered with his existing customers.?He would begin his sales process by assessing if there could be specific needs that his company could help fulfill.?If the customers’ needs match his company’s strengths, then Cedric will continue his communication with the customer, qualifying other areas such as budget, relationships, and business potential.

If the customer did not match Cedric’s requirements, he would politely tell the customer that this might not be a good opportunity that his company can be of service.?Over time, Cedric would be able to narrow down his qualified customers to a few that he would follow through attentively.?The result was that Cedric achieved his sales targets consistently despite the decreased business activity due to the pandemic..

The Importance of Qualifying

In a recent LinkedIn poll regarding “what is the weakest link or most critical challenge towards winning more sales”, 39% of the respondents reported, “qualifying” as the biggest challenge, followed by “weak follow-through” at 35%.?Only 22% thought it was “insufficient prospecting”, followed by 4% who thought it was due to “price negotiations”.

While some sales managers lamented that their salespeople could achieve better sales results if they were to prospect more, they also elaborated that the sales leads that salespeople generated would have to be qualified in the first place.?Otherwise, it will all be a waste of time and resources.

In some ways, salespeople who qualify customers will be sieving out those unqualified so that they could spend more time and resources to follow through with the qualified ones.?Hence, there’s a strong correlation between the top 2 choices in the above poll.?Salespeople would then be able to respond faster and better to the requests of qualified customers.

The key to sales success is to reduce the time, resources, and energy spent on unqualified customers and then go all out to commit to qualified ones.?It’s a shame that the process of qualifying customers was not given enough attention in many sales training programmes, and many sales teams could benefit a lot from this under-rated skill.

My name is c.j., and I’m the co-author of Sales Map, a sales proficiency assessment tool that allows you to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of each person on your sales team, throughout your sales cycle.?I'm also the author of "Winning the B2B Sale in China", which is available on Amazon.

Please connect with me on LinkedIn?https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/cydj001/?or e-mail?[email protected]?to find out more!Want to find out more about how my team and I can do for you!